


Just Know That You’re Loved (and that you're enough)

by asexualjuliet



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Let Toph Say Fuck, Post-Episode: s03e17 The Ember Island Players, Swearing, Zuko's Scar (Avatar), the mandatory “toph finds out about zuko’s scar” fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24831964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asexualjuliet/pseuds/asexualjuliet
Summary: “You have a scar,” Toph says, always one to cut to the chase. The play was shit, but Toph is assuming the kid who’d said something about a scar on the wrong side could in fact see a scar on Zuko’s face.Or, the obligatory “Toph finds out about Zuko’s scar” fic
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Zuko
Comments: 82
Kudos: 1498
Collections: avatar tingz





	Just Know That You’re Loved (and that you're enough)

**Author's Note:**

> I uhhhhh finally watched AtLA and DAMN was it good!!
> 
> I’m absolutely soft for Toph & Zuko so here! Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title from “Battles” by La’Porsha Renae
> 
> (Also is the “Holy shit.” “Yeah. Holy shit.” part based off of Robin’s coming out scene from Stranger Things??? Yes what about it. Is Toph’s “‘Cause if your own family’s too fucked up to love you, you can always find your own who will” based off of Chris Chambers’ “If your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should” from Stand By Me??? Yes what about it).

“Hey, Sparky.”

Toph plops down next to Zuko, who’s been sitting in the yard of the Ember Island house since dinner. Katara and Aang went to sleep early, as did Sokka and Suki, allegedly (though Toph knows for a fact they’re just kissing).

“Hey,” says Zuko. 

“You have a scar,” she says, always one to cut to the chase. The play was shit, but Toph is assuming the kid who’d said something about a scar on the wrong side could in fact see a scar on Zuko’s face. 

She feels his breath catch in his chest. “Uh, yeah,” he says, after a few seconds, and though he tries to make the words sound casual, Toph can feel his heartbeat speed up ever-so-slightly. 

“Can I see it?” she asks, and Zuko’s heart starts to pound. 

“I, um, yeah,” he says fumblingly, and Toph gets the sense that he doesn’t want her to see it at all. 

“But not if you don’t want me to,” she says. There’s a pause. Zuko takes a breath. 

“No, I mean, it’s only fair. Everyone else has to see it every day, you should get a turn, too.”

“Okay,” says Toph, and she reaches out a hand. She’s barely even touched Zuko’s face when he flinches back. 

“Shit, sorry,” says Zuko, heart now going at a million miles an hour. 

“It’s okay,” Toph says, taking her hand back. “I don’t have to, Sparky, it’s fine.”

“N-no, you should,” says Zuko. “I should. It’ll be good for m—for us.” Toph doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but she gets the sense that Zuko’s got a real shitty backstory. 

“Can I just—” he says, and takes her hand, slowly guiding it up to his face. 

Zuko’s hand is much bigger than hers, but it's gentle and warm and it feels nice holding hers. 

“This is the regular part of my face,” he says, bringing her hand up to the right side of his face. 

“Your skin is smooth,” she says. 

Zuko says nothing, but she feels the corner of his mouth turn up in a smile. 

“And, um, this is my scar,” he says, shifting her hand to the right. She almost gasps. It’s like she’s crossed some kind of invisible line between soft skin and hard leather.

The scar is big, takes up almost half of his face. She was expecting maybe a long thin scratch from a sword or a knife, a small burn on his cheek. 

Instead, she feels hard, leathery skin, stretching from Zuko’s forehead down to his left cheek, going all the way across his face to his ear, which is lumpy and misshapen. The scar’s almost shaped like—

“A hand,” she says, and saying it out loud only confirms her suspicions as Zuko’s heart speeds up again. “It’s shaped like a hand.”

There’s a pause in which Zuko probably hears nothing, but Toph feels everything, the way his grip on her hand tightens, the way his body stiffens up and his too-fast heartbeat, underlying all of it. 

“Yeah.”

“Whose ass do I have to kick?” Toph asks, letting go of Zuko’s hand, and she’s dead fucking serious. Anyone who messes with Zuko messes with her. If she’s not protecting her slightly awkward, fully badass maybe-big brother, she’s not doing anything worth her time. 

(Except helping Aang get ready to fight the Firelord. That’s important, too).

“Toph—” Zuko starts. 

“I will!” Toph says. “I’ll kick his ass! Man, you didn’t see me at Earth Rumble Six, I—”

“It was my father,” Zuko says, and that in itself is enough to make Toph go dead silent. 

“Holy shit,” she says, after a few seconds of silence, and Zuko exhales sharply. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Holy shit.”

“Can I ask how?” she asks softly. 

“Yeah, I—” Zuko starts. “Yeah.”

He takes a deep breath. 

“So, um, when I was thirteen—” Toph feels something stab at her heart—fear or pain, she doesn’t know, because thirteen is barely older than she is, but at the same time is so young, because she’ll be thirteen in two months’ time, and she can’t even imagine feeling pain like that at thirteen, thirteen, thirteen. 

“When I was thirteen, I begged my father to let me attend one of his war meetings.” Another deep breath. “One of our—one of _their_ generals was planning to sacrifice an entire unit of soldiers as a diversion. I was thirteen—” there’s that stab at Toph’s heart again “—and I spoke out of turn against it.”

He pauses, perhaps to prepare himself for what comes next. Toph waits. 

“The Fire Nation has these really fucked up standards about respect, so because I disrespected the general, I had to fight in an Agni Kai.”

“Agni Kai?” asks Toph, the words unfamiliar coming off her tongue. 

“Yeah, it’s a—kind of a firebending duel, and to win, you have to burn your opponent.”

A sick kind of feeling builds in the pit of Toph’s stomach. She sees where the story is going. 

“So the day comes, right? And I’m scared shitless. I have to fight a general who’s been firebending for longer than I’ve been alive, and there’s no chance of me winning—maybe if I was a fucking prodigy like Azula, but—”

He cuts himself off. Takes another deep breath. 

“Because the war meeting happened in my father’s war room, Fire Nation laws stated that I had disrespected _him.”_

The sick feeling in Toph’s stomach only grows. 

“I didn’t—no one told me that before it happened. I don’t think any of them knew. But I walked out into the stadium, and there were like, a shit-ton of people just watching me, and I thought, well maybe since all these people are watching and I’m the Fire Lord’s kid, he’ll go easy on me, right?”

Zuko barks a bitter laugh. “I dunno. He might have just burned my wrist or something, tried not to hurt a little kid. But my dad walks out, and he’s a fucking force to be reckoned with, and I still felt some kind of need to prove myself to him. So I stand there, scared out of my fucking mind, and I tell him I’m not going to fight him, and he tells me that—”

He cuts off again, and without thinking, Toph grabs his hand and squeezes it. 

“You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher,” Zuko says, and his voice is not that of the strong warrior she used to fear, but of a broken boy who she can’t help but love. 

“That’s what he said before he burned me,” Zuko says. “For so long, I thought it meant something, that there was some message in those words that I could use to make him love me again.”

His voice breaks. “Turns out he was just a fucking asshole,” he says, before letting loose a quiet sob and covering his face with his hand. 

“You know I can still see you,” Toph says softly. She’s answered by faint gasps as Zuko tries to catch his breath through the tears

“It’s okay to cry,” she says, and she’s well out of her depth in this situation, but she hugs him anyway, hoping to provide a little comfort. “This whole thing is… just _so_ fucked up, you’re allowed to cry.”

Zuko just lets out another gut-wrenching sob, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her shoulder. She rubs his back like she’s felt Sokka do for her and Aang before, when they were sick or crying or both. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’re safe now. You’ve got us.”

She holds him as he cries, rubs his back and runs a hand through his hair, which is shorter and fluffier than she’d thought. Toph figures he’s probably cut his hair since he was known to her friends as “ponytail guy,” and she thinks the new style suits him. 

“I’m sorry,” he says after a while, once he’s all cried out, the tears on Toph’s shoulder beginning to dry. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Shut up, Sparky,” Toph says, and he does. 

“Thanks,” he says. 

“No prob,” she responds, grabbing his hand again and leaning against his shoulder. 

There’s a silence, punctuated only by the sounds of Zuko and Toph breathing. 

“We’re your family, y’know,” Toph says after a few seconds. “Me and Aang and Katara and Sokka and Suki. ‘Cause if your own family’s too fucked up to love you, you can always find your own who will.”

“I know,” says Zuko softly, and Toph gets the sense that _yeah,_ he really does. 

“I love you, Sparky,” says Toph, and it’s the first time in a long time that those words have come off her lips, the first time she can remember saying them with anything less than resentment. 

Because Zuko is not her parents. He’s not overbearing, doesn’t think she’s weak. He’s her brother, he knows how powerful she is and he respects it. He cries into her shoulder and she knows for a fact that he’d let her cry into his. 

_He’s_ her family, this banished prince, this restless warrior, this broken boy. And she loves him. 

“I love you, too,” he says, squeezing her little hand, and Toph can’t fight the smile that comes over her. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> All mistakes are my own, please let me know if you see any!
> 
> Kudos/Comments are greatly appreciated!


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